Welcome to Transfigurations! This blog is intended to serve the orthodox Anglican community and the wider Christian community. We pray that all that is posted here will be faithful to the Scriptures as the inspired word of God, speak the truth in love, edify, bless and transform this local body of Christ, and be an impetus for revival, repentance, prayer and intercession!

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

A.S. Haley: Don't Get Drawn In
Your Curmudgeon, it is true, swore off getting involved in the current political
miasma: there was nothing to be gained from trying to make one's voice heard in
the welter of so much fake news and disinformation. I advised my readers to
remain above the fray -- and that remains good advice.

However, there
comes a time when the rule should be suspended, in the interest of keeping my
regular readers confirmed in their course. And now, with President Trump's
signing of the so-called "Omnibus Bill" -- a bloated monstrosity of legislative
diarrhea if ever there was such a thing -- is the time to dive in and point out
the facts which the mainstream media are withholding from the public.

The
Omnibus Bill, pretty much everyone agrees, is a spending bacchanal -- there are
few limits to what the Democrats want to spend money on, and supposedly likewise
for the RINOs who are currently controlling the flow of legislation in Congress.
Planned Parenthood? It gets full funding, as always. The long-promised border
wall? Only a stretch of fence is supposedly funded, and the President is
supposedly barred from spending any of the fence money on his Wall.

Well,
your Curmudgeon is here to tell you that what you read and see in the mainstream
media on these points is all fake: it could not be farther from the
Constitutional reality that our founders established in 1789.

You see,
under the Constitution and Article I, it is Congress' responsibility to pass a
budget -- which blueprint, if Congress wants its budget to become a Law
of the United States, binding on the President and other branches, has to be in
the form of a Bill (see U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 7)...

Spitting in God’s Face
Of all of the passages describing what the religious leaders and their crowd did to Jesus before his crucifixion, it’s the verses above that get to me the most. The description that makes me shudder...

Inside the .zip, lies an ‘index.html’ page that acts as a portal to your personal data. Visually, it looks like an ad-free stripped down version of Facebook that’s actually quite relaxing.

As I’m trying to reduce my exposure to social networks, I decided to take a look at this info. By extrapolating the data of a single individual (me), I might be able to better apprehend the capabilities of the beast. In the end, it all comes down to what is tracked and what can be deduced from that....

...Writing to believers in Corinth, the apostle Paul described this dynamic in the language of warfare:

The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:4–5)

Indeed, to work for one another’s joy (2 Corinthians 1:24) is to wage war for each other’s thinking and feeling.

Here’s how I’ve learned to apply this text to the daily issue of my attitude, specifically to irritation, and its ugly siblings (aggravation, grumpiness, self-pity, resentment, and more). Notice three elements in this passage: strongholds to be named, opinions to be destroyed, and thoughts to be captured...